Assignment 10 - Books I'd Like to Read

Assignment 10 - Books I’d Like to Read


1. Bstan-‘dzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XIV, & Vreeland N. (2001). An open heart: Practicing compassion in everyday life. Boston: Little, Brown.
2. Brown, D. (1998). Digital fortress. New York: St. Martin's Press.

3. Brown, D. (2009). The lost symbol: A novel. New York: Doubleday.

4. Dennnett, D.C. (1995) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc.

5. Hooper, M. (2008). Newes from the dead. New York: Roaring Brook Press.

6. Hooper, R. J. (2007). Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu: The parallel sayings : the common teachings of four world religions. Sedona, AZ: Sanctuary Publications.

7. Kantra, R. A. (1984). All things vain: Religious satirists and their art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

8. Mosse, K. (1998). Crucifix lane. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

9. Mosse, K. (2009). The cave. London: Orion.

10. Nichols, S. J. (2008). Jesus made in America: A cultural history from the Puritans to The passion of the Christ. Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic.

11. O'Dell, S. (1976). Zia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

12. Rogak, L. (2009). Haunted heart: The life and times of Stephen King. New York: Thomas Dunne Books.

13. Silliman, R., & Silliman, R. (2007). The age of huts (compleat). New California poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press.



Using WorldCat, the Google Book Project, Library Thing, and GoodReads, I searched for books and authors that I would like to read. I particularly enjoyed this assignment in the sense that finding books to read for the pure sake of reading enjoyment is something that I never seem to find the time to do. I usually find myself reading school or work material with little time left over for reading for the pure pursuit of knowledge, a good story, or the appreciation of good prose. For this reason, I ended up with more ten books on my list.

I began my search on GoodReads, searching authors that I am interested in reading. In most of these cases I have read other books by these authors, enjoyed them, and have wanted to read more of their work. My terms for this part of my search included “Dan Brown”, “Kate Mosse”, and “The Dalai Lama”. The book “The Cave”, by Kate Mosse actually received mixed reviews which seemed to lean on the negative side, however, I have enjoyed her past work so much that I still added this work to my list.

I found several books simply by exploring these websites, using reviews and tag clouds. On Library Thing I clicked on the ZeitGeist tab, out of curiosity. There I was able to find books and authors categorized by many different methods, including the best rated, the worst rated, by user tags, and by author name. I clicked on a tag that read “the philosophy of science” and was led to the book “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life.” Last fall I was able to visit the Darwin exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and ever since I have wanted to read more about Charles Darwin and his work. This book got decent reviews on both Library Thing and Amazon, so I added it to my list.

Another major interest area of mine is that of religion and social justice. I had several favorite authors that I read during my previous master’s program at the seminary I attended, and would like to find the time to continue reading their work. Marcus Borg was my favorite author during that time in my education, so I searched his name. I didn’t find any new books by Borg, but I was led to another book by Richard Hooper who used Borg in his work. This book was called “Jesus Buddha Krishna Lao Tzu: The Parallel Sayings: The Common Teachings of Four world religions”. I have always been interested in world religions, especially regarding the comparisons and contrasts between Eastern and Western cultures, so I found this title interesting. After looking through the sample pages available for preview on Google Books, I added it to my list. While conducting this search on the Google Book Project, I also searched the terms “Jesus progressive Christianity” and “Jesus and Social Justice”. This led to discovering the title “Jesus Made in America”, which I also added to my list. While searching the Google Book Project I also came across a book by Scot O’Dell titled “Zia”. I found this book by searching the title “Island of the Blue Dolphins”, which is a book that impacted me as a child. I added this book to my list because it continues the story of the main character in that novel.

Lastly, I searched the WorldCat database and found that this website also offers the option of searching by clicking a tag cloud found on the main page. I clicked on several tag clouds including “historical fiction” and “satirical non-fiction”. These searches led me to the titles “All Things in Vain: Religious Satirists and their Art” and “Newes from the Dead”. While on WorldCat, I also searched “Stephen King”, whose work I have always enjoyed, and found the title “Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King.

I found this assignment to be useful and enjoyable, and hope that I find an opportunity to read these books. This was an excellent final assignment for this course.

Assignment 9 - Information Literacy Google Scholar Search and Analysis

1. Behrens, Shirley J. (1994). A conceptual analysis and historical overview of information literacy. College & Research Libraries, 55(4), 309-22. – Cited 178 times.
2. Breivik, P. S. (1991). Information literacy. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 79(2), 226. – Cited 184 times
3. Bruce, C. (1997). The seven faces of information literacy. Auslib Press Adelaide. – Cited 516 times
4. Bruce, C. (2002). Information literacy as a catalyst for educational change: A background paper. In White Paper prepared for UNESCO, the US National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, and the national Forum on Information Literacy, for use at the Information Literacy Meeting of Experts, Prague, the Czech Republic. – Cited 99 times
5. Bruce, Christine Susan. (1995). Information literacy: A framework for higher education. Australian Library Journal, 44(3), 158-70. – Cited 54 times
6. Dewald, N., Scholz-Crane, A., Booth, A., & Levine, C. (2000). Information literacy at a distance: instructional design issues. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 26(1), 33-44. doi:doi:10.1016/S0099-1333(99)00121-4 – Cited 86 times
7. Doyle, Christina S. (1994). Information literacy in an information society: A concept for the information age. - Google Books. Darby, PA: DIANE Publishing. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Z1IJ6A97WnsC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=information+literacy&ots=cyToYI75Je&sig=gD7JTAwcvv2Tm00izq3BSw6z2Ns#v=onepage&q&f=false – Cited 153 times
8. Eisenberg, Michael B. (2008). Information literacy: Essential skills for the information age. Journal of Library and Information Technology, 28(2). Retrieved from http://www.indianjournals.com/ijor.aspx?target=ijor:dbit&volume=28&issue=2&article=005 – Cited 89 times
9. Grafstein, A. (2002). A discipline-Based approach to information literacy. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 28(4), 197-204. – Cited 130 times
10. Grassian, Esther S., & Kaplowitz, Joan R. (2010). Information literacy instruction - Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd Edition. Retrieved from http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a917629725 - Cited 83 times
11. Horton, Forest Woody, Jr. (1983). Information literacy vs. computer literacy. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, 9(4), 14-16. – Cited 51 times
12. Jacobs, S. K., Rosenfeld, P., & haber, J. (2003). Information literacy as the foundation for evidence-based practice in graduate nursing education: a curriculum-integrated approach. Journal of Professional Nursing, 19(5), 320-328. – Cited 60 times
13. Literacy in the information age: Inquiries into meaning making with new technologies. (n.d.). . Retrieved August 16, 2010, from http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED474205&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED474205 – Cited 50 times
14. Marcum, James W. (2002). Rethinking information literacy. The Library Quarterly, 72(1), 1-26. – Cited 98 times
15. Rader, H. B. (2002). Information literacy 1973-2002: a selected literature review. Library trends, 51(2), 242–259. – Cited 83 times
16. Shapiro, J. J., & Hughes, S. K. (1996). Information literacy as a liberal art? EDUCOM review, 31, 31–35. – Cited 174 times
17. Spitzer, Kathleen L., Eisenberg, Michael B., & Lowe, Carrie A. (1998). Information literacy: Essential skills for the information age. Syracuse, NY: Information Resources Publications, Syracuse University. Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED427780&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED427780 – Cited 82 times
18. Webber, S. and Johnston, B. Conceptions of information literacy: new perspectives and implications. (2000). Journal of Information Science, 26(6), 381-397. doi:10.1177/016555150002600602 – Cited 138 times

Analysis

During the process of compiling my first bibliography for assignment number eight, I experienced a great deal of frustration while toggling between the two databases. It seemed unusually difficult. When I would find an article that appeared in both the Library Literature and Information Science Full Text Database that was relevant to the topic of information literacy, I would then search the Social Sciences Citation Index to find its number of times cited and would find that the article in question was not found. It seemed for the first hour or so of working on this project that when I found an article that was indexed in both databases, it was often not cited the required number of times to be used in my bibliography. I attempted to search using Boolean operators, by author, title, keyword, and subject (or any combination of the four), and often found that the article from the Library and Literature Information Science Full Text Database could not be found in the SSCI. I also connected using the Kent VPN Client because I am a Columbus student, and was logged out on a few different occasions.

I finally began finding articles listed in both databases after approximately an hour and a half of work on this project, and was able to create a relevant bibliography. From this experience I was led to believe that the Social Sciences Citation Index was not very extensive, because most of the searches I performed yielded no useable results.

However, when using Google Scholar to locate articles concerning information literacy, not only did the search yield many pages of results with the amount of times an item has been cited listed in the result summary, but it also returned articles that had been cited many times. If I were actually writing a scholarly paper using these search results, I would be assured that these were reliable and important sources in the subject area because of the amount of their use in other work. For the purposes of this project, I easily found many results that were relevant and useable in my bibliography.

I often find that Google products consist of very user-friendly interfaces. The technology Google uses is highly efficient in that it returns relevant search results and information. I believe that as Google and similar companies expand, it is possible that such organizations could become a dominating presence in the library and information science arena simply due to their accessibility, accuracy, and usability. To use Weinberger’s terminology, the differences I experienced between my KentLINK searches and my Google Scholar search seemed to be an issue of “intertwingularity”. The Google search that I performed demonstrated that technology’s ability to navigate the “intertwingularity” of the search terms I used and the items indexed in the database in a relevant way, where as the “intertwingularity” of information indexed in the SSCI was not well navigated. Terminology, metadata, and language did not seem to be tied together in relevant ways that enabled an easy search of a topic. Instead, searches needed to be very exact, in a way that was both overly simplistic and extremely complicated at once, using both advanced search features and the exact words of a title, author, or journal publication.

References

Weinberger, D. (2008). Everything is miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder. New York: Henry Holt.

Assignment # 8 - Information Literacy Bibliography

Arp, L. (1990). Information Literacy or Bibliographic Instruction – Semantics or Philosophy. RQ, 30(1), 46-49. - Cited 8 times.
Arp, L., Woodard, B.S., & Lindauer, B.G. (2004). Information literacy and instruction - The three arenas of information literacy assessment. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 44(2), 122-129. - Cited 8 times.
Bawden, D. (2001a). Information and digital literacies: A review of concepts. Journal of Documentation, 57(2), 218-259. – Cited 62 times.
Bawden, D. (2001b). The shifting terminologies of information. Aslib Proceedings, 53(3), 93-98. – Cited 11 times.
Boon,S., Johnston, B., & Webber, S. (2007). A phenomenographic study of English faculty's conceptions of information literacy. Journal of Documentation, 63(2), 204-228. - Cited 16 times. (n.d.). .
Crawford, J. (2006). The use of electronic information services and information literacy: A Glasgow Caledonian University study. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 38(1), 33-44. doi:10.1177/0961000606060958 - cited 6 times.
Crawford, J, De Vicente, A., & Clink, S. (2004). Use and awareness of electronic information services by students at Glasgow Caledonian University: a longitudinal study.Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 36(3), 101-117. – Cited 6 times.
Julien, H. (2000). Information literacy instruction in Canadian academic libraries: Longitudinal trends and international comparisons. College & Research Libraries, 61(6), 510-523. – Cited 17 times.
Julien, H., & Boon,S. (2004). Assessing instructional outcomes in Canadian academic libraries. Library and Information Science Research, 26(2), 121-139. – Cited 10 times.
Julien, H., & Breu, R.D. (2005). Instructional practices in Canadian public libraries. Library and Information Science Research, 27(3), 281-301. – Cited 7 times.
Lloyd, A. (2006). Information literacy landscapes: an emerging picture. Journal of Documentation, 62(5), 570-583. – Cited 16 times.
Mansourian, Y., & Ford, N. (2007). Understanding student information behavior in relation to electronic information services: Lessons from
longitudinal monitoring and evaluation, part 2. Journal of Documentation, 63(5), 680-701. – Cited 6 times.
Owusu-Ansah, E.K. (2004). Information literacy and higher education: Placing the academic library in the center of a comprehensive solution. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 30(1), 3-16. – Cited 16 times.
Robinson, L., & Bawden, D. (2001). Libraries and open society; Popper, Soros and digital information. Aslib Proceedings, 53(5), 167-178. – Cited 5 times.
Rowley, J., & Urquhart, C. (2007). Understanding student information behavior in relation to electronic information services: Lessons from
longitudinal monitoring and evaluation, part 1. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(8), 1162-1174. – Cited 8 times.
Urquhart, C., & Rowley, J. (2007). Understanding student information behavior in relation to electronic information services: Lessons from
longitudinal monitoring and evaluation, part 2. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(8), 1188-1197. – Cited 8 times.

Assignment 7: Comparing and Contrasting Images of World War II in the USA and Europe

I chose to search the Library of Congress’ Prints and Photographs Online Catalog for photographs of the World War II era, specifically searching for results that compared and contrasted images of life in the USA and life in Europe during this time. I sought image content that demonstrated the climate of wartime in these two very different contexts. To find these images I used the search terms “World War II”, “home front World War II”, “USA World War II”, “Germany World War II” and “Europe World War II”.

I was very intrigued by the results of my search. It was fascinating to have such immediate access to real-life images from this era of history. I also found the visual art, sketches, and cartoons, to be invaluable primary sources describing life during this era. The social and political commentary offered in photographs and artwork shows the feelings of real individuals who lived through this experience, as well as the endeavors of the media to control the portrayal of events.

It seems that the majority of items returned in my search results that depicted life in America during the World War II era contained cartoons of political commentary and images of wartime life portrayed in a positive light. Even Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. is shown posing in his jeep while in Europe. Likewise military men are shown looking cozy and comfortable, though packed into their quarters in the photograph “New York Port of embarkation during World War II. In days of peace, a stateroom for one.” Other photographs show women working in factories in the place of soldiers and officers in uniform shaking hands. One image that was particularly interesting is entitled “Fall Planting”, which depicts a skeletal woman sprinkling the ground with the bodies of fallen American soldiers, referred to as “the best seed of Europe.” This seems to contrast with another image that depicts thriving Iowa farmland during the war years. Another interesting image reveals political feelings toward Japan. This image, entitled “One killer still at large”, is a cartoon sketch composed in 1945, showing a hunter and two wolves. The first wolf, labeled “Nazi” is depicted as dead, while the second wolf, labeled “Japan”, stands off in the distance.

In contrast, the majority of images found of Europe during the second World War seemed to depict destruction and reconstruction, devastation, and combat. There are pictures of soldiers in harsh conditions, such as the photograph entitled “Im Osten” showing a German soldier in protective clothing on the freezing, Eastern front of the war. There are also images of refugees and civilians amid the rubble caused by bombings. One image in particular shows a British woman with her belongings being pulled behind her in a baby carriage on a street filled with debris. Also, Many of the search results returned aerial views of bombings in European countries.

The digital efforts of the library of congress are incredible, as they provide an opportunity for individuals who cannot travel to Washington D.C. to view their collections. However, many of my search results returned extremely small, hard-to-read images, with a note that larger versions were physically available at the Library of Congress, and many of the returned results were descriptions of items that were not available digitally at all.
I also felt that while the images were accessible, the smaller versions available digitally were not very useful. I would still need to travel to D.C. to see a full-size image in detail if I were doing in-depth work on the topic. In this respect, there is still work to be done on the behalf of the Library of Congress in digitizing their collection for the purposes of accessibility, but from the look and feel of the website, it seems as though work and improvements on digitization are currently underway. I expect that as time progresses, the library of congress will have a great deal of items digitized, revolutionizing the world of digital and special collections. This library holds many special, one-of-a-kind documents and items that, if digitized for all to access immediately, would be an extraordinary feat in the area of accessibility of information.

Assignment 6 - Ancient Manuscripts on Flickr

Flickr ID: LauraSpurlock
Name of Gallery: Assignment # 6 - Photo Folio - Ancient Manuscripts and Texts

It was difficult to decide on a theme for this photo folio. I knew I wanted to follow a theme that included photos of ancient locations and artifacts, but felt that I should further narrow this broad category. I feel connected to ancient texts, documents, and manuscripts, because I have spent so much time studying ancient and modern languages, religion, and history. I also spend a great deal of my free time reading about this topic or watching PBS, The History Channel, The Discovery Channel or National Geographic. I feel particularly connected to the historical Mediterranean and ancient Near Eastern areas after spending three years in seminary studying ancient Greece, Turkey, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt, among other locations, so when I decided to search for photos of ancient documents, I was particularly drawn to photos of texts in these parts of the world. I was interested in finding photos that showed where these ancient languages and their usages intersected with religion and ceremony, so several of the photos that I included contained texts found in churches and tombs, as well as texts used for ritualistic purposes.

I used the following search terms without Boolean Operators:

Religion
Ancient civilization
Ancient civilization writing
Ancient writing
Ancient documents
Ancient texts
Ancient manuscripts

I found useful results from most of these search terms and actually had to create three galleries because I originally found so many photos. I then narrowed the three galleries down to 18 pictures, the limit for one gallery on Flickr. I also further limited my search to only return content under the creative commons license, so the fact that I was able to find so many results was impressive. Aside from the limitation of the number of photos one can include in a gallery, I was impressed with Flickr. I have often used it in the past for projects and find that it is fast and effective, and its option to only return results under a creative commons license is very useful. The site is also very easy to use and navigate in my opinion, and it offers useful tools for locating information and searching such as interactive features, tagging, and tag clouds.